Una Marson broadcasts to British troops in the West Indies in 1942.
Photograph: Fred Ramage/Getty Images

Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.

Rather than acknowledge that a major university was right to be responsive to student concerns, two British newspapers saw fit to turn an open letter from Cambridge English students into a trumped-up existential crisis for white male writers. By “decolonising” the curriculum this endangered species would now be sacrificed, apparently, like so many hapless Guys on bonfire night, to the burning fires of black and minority ethnic special interest. Nice dramatic scenario, pity about the truth content.

‘Welcome and important’: academics on decolonising education

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The real danger is that the substantive issues at stake that concern us all, not just ethnic minorities, become obscured in this facile attempt at stoking a keyboard race war with real-life consequences at a time when hate crimes are on the rise. The young people who wrote this letter, however, have an admirable clarity of vision and a robust faith in knowledge that is inspiring. They are interested in asking challenging questions about themselves and others, and how we see ourselves in relation to each other.

Decolonising the curriculum is, first of all, the acceptance that education, literary or otherwise, needs to enable self-understanding. This is particularly important to people not used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of conventional learning – whether women, gay people, disabled people, the working classes or ethnic minorities. Knowledge and culture is collectively produced and these groups, which intersect in different ways, have as much right as elite white men to understand what their own role has been in forging artistic and intellectual achievements.

However, it is not only about admiring yourself in the mirror – a fact that eludes those shrieking about the nonexistent elimination of straight white men from the curriculum. Real knowledge is not self-puffery, the repeated validation of oneself. In English literature, it involves learning about the lives of others, whether these be Robert Wedderburn, the fiery black Scottish working-class preacher who believed in self-emancipation; the working-class poet Robert Bloomfield; or Una Marson, the suffragist and broadcaster who wrote eloquently about race and the colour-bar in Britain as well as resonant poetry about her native Jamaica.

Cape Coast Castle, Ghana: ‘Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced.’ Photograph: Alamy

Surely, Sultana’s Dream, the early 20th-century fantasy story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – where men stayed home while only women went out – has a relevance for our understanding of Muslim women’s long and rich history of writing and debate. (Yes, it exists.)

To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.

Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage

A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.

It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.

Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.

Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.

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The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.

Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.

• Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. She was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi